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Why Johnny Can’t Read

In the current Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr argues that incessant Internet use is mutating not just the way we read, but the way we think. Even our offline reading habits have been infected. Now we read books the way we read the Web: we browse; we skim; we get distracted; we bounce elsewhere, never to return. “I can’t read ‘War and Peace’ anymore,” a pathologist complains. “Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.”

As a service to those who sympathize, we offer just one paragraph (excerpted from Carr’s thirty-four), on how commerce may be driving us to become, in the words of Jeff Bezos, “information snackers”:

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

—Rollo Romig

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